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• My day off, and I slept in until way after midday. What a waste of time. I didn’t do much of any interest for the rest of the day.

Unicode Font

• It’s funny what’s available, and what isn’t. I’m used to coding with Courier New as my font, or at least some fixed-pitch monotone slab-serif font, but I can’t find a fixed-pitch Unicode font with enough glyphs to use in my editor. Editing with a proportional font makes it rather pointless indenting anything, but editing a document full of concealed or incorrect characters is even more pointless. Of the more than one hundred fonts installed on this system, only “Lucida Sans Unicode”, “Code2000” and “Code2001”, “Arial MS Unicode”, “MS Mincho” and “Palatino Linotype” contain the subscript characters ₍₀₁₂₃₄₅₆₇₈₉₊₋₌₎, which is what I’m currently using as an indicator as to whether a font is likely to contain any of the rarer Unicode sub-ranges. Out of those, only “Arial MS Unicode”, “Code2000” and “MS Mincho” would allow one to write the mildly amusing phrase, ⓐⓢⓒⓘⓘ ⓢⓣⓤⓟⓘⓓ ⓠⓤⓔⓢⓣⓘⓞⓝ ⒢⒠⒯ ⒜ ⒮⒯⒰⒫⒤⒟ ⒜⒩⒮⒤. “Arial MS Unicode” contains 50377 glyphs, covering all code points within the Unicode Standard, version 2.1. “Code2000”, a shareware font, contains 34801 glyphs but no hinting or font smoothing, instead relying on Windows’ font smoothing, which, for various reasons, I have turned off – so it looks rather grim and I can’t use it. “MS Mincho” contains 17807 glyphs, making it the most complete fixed-pitch font that I’ve been able to find, and thus the one I’m forced to use when editing Unicode code. Sadly, it’s not a nice font, hard to read at small sizes and not at all like Courier or any of the console fonts that I’m used to, but I guess I can adapt. As an interesting comparison, a font supporting the standard basic Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, along with the extended and supplemented Latin contains around 650 glyphs and a standard extended font with Hebrew and Arabic ranges, such as the common “Times New Roman”, “Arial” and “Courier New” that ship with Windows XP contains around 1320 glyphs. It’s probably worth noting that I have found very few applications that seem to be able to handle editing in Unicode anyway – and that’s including those that say they can. Ironically, the basic Notepad that ships with Windows XP handles Unicode and UTF-8 correctly, while expensive things such as Dreamweaver, while claiming to handle Unicode – don’t very well at all. EditPlus, the editor I use for almost everything, can open and save in Unicode and UTF-8 formats (and any other code page installed), but it still stupidly converts any typed or pasted Unicode into question marks, and strongly disagrees with big-endian Unicode. I really hope they get around to fixing it. XMLSpy stands out in this field, able to read and write in any format, without any problems – but unfortunately it’s not well suited to general editing, and still seems a bit immature. Perhaps one day someone will make my ideal text editor, along with my ideal font. I’m curious to know what font Mozilla uses, and where it is, as it seems quite complete.

Centrelink

• I phoned Centrelink to find out why my payment had decreased. It seems I have to fill out another rent assistance form, which they’re sending out to me. Apparently they’ve now changed to an automated PIN system and are planning to begin operating similar to phone banking, but when the woman tried to transfer me to wherever it is I can get my PIN from, it didn’t work.

1:25am

• I’ve just watched “Bulletproof”. I wasn’t overly impressed. I’d better get my stuff ready for uni tomorrow and get to bed; it’s already later than I’d wanted.